Citrix User Profile Manager: User Store Design Recommendations

Citrix User Profile Manager, co-developed by sepago and Citrix, has been released. This is the first in a loose series of articles about UPM I intend to write. I will start by giving recommendations on how to set up the central profile storage called “user store”.

Notes on the release:

UPM is available on “My Citrix”. Just follow these instructions on how to get to the download. Note that the marketing guys have recently renamed UPM to “Portable Profiles”, so make sure you look for that term. Another thing of importance is that this release is technologically rather different from the tech preview. But that is the topic of another article.

User Store Design

The user store is the location on the network where a user’s UPM profiles are kept. Any file share the user has write access to will do. When thinking about how and where to set up the user store it is important to keep in mind that it contains more than just a copy of a user’s profile. In the current release, UPM also supports synchronization of files outside the profile, but future releases may provide additional features that each require their own “compartment” in the user store. This is all rather theoretical and may sound more complicated than it actually is. Follow these recommendations and you should be on the safe side now and in the future:

  • Plan for one user store per user.
  • Use subfolders to segregate data from different platforms.
  • Configure the path to the user store to point to the corresponding subfolder on each platform. This is accomplished easiest using group policy objects linked to OUs.

Example:

You have two platforms you want to use UPM on: terminal servers running Windows Server 2008 and clients running Windows Vista. The TS farm is divided into multiple silos, each providing different published applications. Since the servers in all silos are installed and configured in a similar way, with regards to UPM they comprise only one “platform”.

You decide to put the user stores on your users’ home drives which are mapped both on the client and TS machines. You want to store all UPM data inside one base folder. The following directory structure is desired on the home drive:

UPM               --> base folder for UPM data on each home drive
UPM\Vista         --> user data from Vista machines
UPM\Server2008    --> user data from Server 2008 machines

You use group policy objects to set the path to the user store to “UPM\Vista” on Vista machines and to “UPM\Server2008” on your terminal servers.

Wrap Up

The setup presented here is simple yet flexible. It allows for future expansions both in your environment and in the functionality UPM offers.

CitrixUser Profile Manager

Comments

Related Posts

Folder De-Localization with Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM)

Windows user profiles prior to Vista / Server 2008 contain localized folder names. End users expect that, of course, but admins tend to hate it because automated management becomes much more difficult. How can this dilemma be resolved? End users only see the local copy of the profile, while admins mostly have to deal with the central copy on a file server. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a “translator” component that makes sure local folders are localized while central folders are in one language only?
User Profiles

Differences Between Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles

From time to time I get asked about the differences between Citrix’s and Immidio’s profile management products. Here are some common questions along with my answers. Can the product be used to provide a single profile on multiple platforms? Citrix Profile Management 3.x does not have cross-platform capabilities built in. That means you cannot use an XP profile on Windows 7, but you can use the same profile on 32 and 64 bit Windows, if you dare. Citrix has a beta version of PM with cross-platform support for MS Office and Internet Explorer. Flex Profiles does not have true cross-platform capabilities either, but it can be used to make settings available cross-platform that have the same format on all platforms. Example: HKCU\Software\Paint.NET is probably a no-brainer whereas copying HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer around is probably a bad idea. Can the product be used on SBC, VDI and fat clients? This is true for both Citrix PM and Flex Profiles (licensing restrictions may apply). Can the product be used to preconfigure a user’s environment? Both Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles are classic profile management products without the capability to set up a specific user environment or distribute updated settings to all users. That is typically referred to as “user environment management” and two free implementations are Microsoft’s Group Policy Preferences and Pierre Marmignon’s Virtual User Environment Manager. Of course there are many alternatives by companies like AppSense or RES. Can portions of the profile be saved during a session as well as at logoff and at disconnects? Citrix Profile Management loads (respectively streams) the profile at logon and writes changes back at logoff. It also has a feature called “active write back” which, if enabled, causes changed files to be written back to the user store immediately. This works for files only, not for registry keys. Flex Profiles typically is configured to import settings at logon and export again at logoff. Since Flex uses a simple tool for the imports/exports it is conceivable to call that tool during a session as well. There is, however, no built-in support for that. Neither is there for exporting settings at disconnects. Can it be configured what to save and what not? Both products are very flexible when it comes to which parts of the profile should be saved. Yet there is one major difference: by default, Profile Management saves everything whereas Flex Profiles saves nothing. As a consequence, PM just works out of the box whereas Flex needs to be configured for each application individually.
User Profiles

Latest Posts

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Minimizing Idle Power Usage

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Minimizing Idle Power Usage
This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In the first post, I showed how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In this second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.
Hardware

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Modding

Fast & Silent 5 Watt PC: Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Modding
This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In this first post, I’m showing how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In a second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.
Hardware